Bradley McCaw is an Australian performer, composer, playwright, and actor. Two weeks ago, myself and some other students were given the opportunity to help our facilitator Adrian Carroll in a studio session, where McCaw was recording songs for his musical-in-progress, The Oasis - a story that follows a group of students as they discover an uninhabited plot of land amidst a world of environmental crisis.
One of the songs that we helped track is named The Remedy, a slow blues-y piece that focuses on staccato piano and bass chords & vocals. This blog post will be a breakdown on how I did a quick mix of this song once we got out of the studio.
The reference tracks that we were given when mixing this piece was Overture (The Full Monty), Wondering (Bridges of Madison County), and Break the Rules (Catch Me if You Can). The one that I payed the most attention to was the track from Catch Me if You Can, a musical about an American con man. I felt that this one was the most relevant to the character that was being portrayed in The Remedy - this cocky, self-assured, self-believing kind of guy.
This reference track was heavily centred around the vocals and the story that the man was telling - everything else was there to support the vocals (as with most musical theatre music).
To replicate this in my mix I mostly focused on using compression and reverb.
Because the session had so many vocal tracks, I put them all through an AUX track and applied reverb to it. All of the backing vocals went through their own reverb track, compared to the lead vocals which had obviously required different reverb parameters. This was the fastest and CPU efficient way to give all my vocals the same reverb effects.
The reverb for the backing vocals had a relatively high decay time (435ms), compared with that of the lead vocals, 142ms. The backing vocals also had more of the wet signal mixed in compared to the lead. There were also other differences that I applied such as a medium vs small space, etc. This was to ensure that the backing vocals sounded very much like their title -
I wanted them further back in the mix, so that the lead vocals could come out and flourish, like I hear in many other musical theatre pieces.
I also routed all outputs of the backing tracks into another AUX track, on which I applied the Pro Compressor. There is one section where all the vocal tracks swell from quiet whispers to shouts - this is the climax of the song and I spent a lot of time trying to make it sound dramatic and keeping that dynamic range, whilst also making sure the tracks did not cause any vocal clipping.
Again, you can see that the backing vocals required more of the plugin than the lead. This is partly because I did not want to blend the lead in with the rest of the mix at all, but also because the backing vocals had a considerably larger dynamic range - that is, they got very loud towards the end of the song.
To compress this track I tried out a technique we had recently been taught, where we focused on a section of the song that had both quiet and loud waveforms next to each other. The trick was to find parameters that suited both of these sections - set the threshold so that for most of the song it was underneath it, but during particularly loud sections the threshold and attack would be triggered. It's a handy trick!
There was some EQ applied but it was mostly done to make room for the lead vocals - taking out the midrange frequencies among the other instruments so that the lead could cut through. Here are some snippets of the EQ I applied on the keyboard and guitar tracks;
Some feedback that I got on this mix was that the last chorus line swelled a little too much - I can see where this is coming from, maybe I got a little bit too carried away - excited about making it sound dramatic (haha). I thoroughly enjoyed mixing for musical theatre and hope I get the chance to do it again!
If you would like to listen to this mix, click below;
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